“From the beginning of time, people have asked themselves the existential question, “If I am doomed to die, what is the point of my life?” It is a terrifying question and different people have attempted to answer it in different ways.
According to the author Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, most people put the notion of death out of their awareness and go about living their lives without thinking about their mortality.
However, there are times when the fact of death breaks through to their conscious minds. When that happens they become temporarily terrified until the crisis passes and they achieve a new balance. What causes mortality to break through to consciouness? The death of friends, relatives and loved ones confronts even the greatest deniers of the fact that life is finite.”
Personally, I don’t see any of this as a negative, and, although we can try to preserve ourselves as long as possible in various ways, mortal death is simply a condition of mortal life, and, in the final analysis, there’s nothing any of us can do about it.
What we can do is choose to live the lives we want to live while we’re here.
